This paper presents a novel active learning approach for transductive support vector machines with applications to text classification. The concept of the centroid of the support vectors is proposed so that the selective sampling based on measuring the distance from the unlabeled samples to the centroid is feasible and simple to compute. With additional hypothesis, active learning offers better performance with comparison to regular inductive SVMs and transductive SVMs with random sampling,and it is even competitive to transductive SVMs on all available training data. Experimental results prove that our approach is efficient and easy to implement.